Yeasted sweet potato rolls

About a month ago I excitedly bought an entire bushel of sweet potatoes; we now have an overabundance. As a result, I have been seeking varied and creative ways to incorporate sweet potatoes into our daily eating. Sweet potato pie, sweet potato soup, sweet potato stew...there are so many possibilities.

When we needed a starch to accompany the soup that we cooked for ourselves and some friends this cold and rainy past Thursday, I thought I'd try my hand at incorporating the sweet potatoes into a bread of some sort.


After doing some research I settled on a sweet potato rolls recipe that I found here, on group recipes.com. Honestly, I chose this rolls recipe over the many others that I saw largely because it called for substantially less butter. I wasn't sure if the relative healthfulness of this recipe would negatively affect the taste of the rolls. Turns out it seemed not to, or at least not too severely from the perspective of my naive tasters, because these rolls were absolutely delicious. Each of us ate at least 2 that evening.



One thing that I feel inclined to mention is that these rolls are not heavy in sweet potato flavor. We didn't complain though since the rolls were light, airy, beautifully golden in color, and tasty. I am putting this recipe on my "prepare for thanksgiving" list for sure. The rolls are certainly worth remaking.



The recipe calls for regular milk. As I so often do these days, I substituted buttermilk, and the rolls came out nicely, indeed. I used all purpose flour and that worked nicely as well.

Mississippi Sweet Potato rolls, from "Group Recipes."

1 1/2 cups cooked sweet potato (reserve 1 cup potato water from cooking)
1 cup milk
1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/3 cup dry milk
2 pks dry yeast
1/4 cup butter, melted
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1tsp salt
5 1/2 cups flour

Wash and chunk unpeeled sweet potato and simmer until tender. Remove and peel immediately. Cool. Reserve potato water for later use. Mash potato meat.
Add salt, nutmeg, sugar and cinnamon.
Add one cup reserved potato water and milk and puree.
Add yeast to puree. It should be warm, about 100 degrees.
Let yeast proof.
Add melted butter and beaten egg.
Add dry milk and about 5 cups flour.
Knead until silver dollar pinch of dough stretches without breaking. Add additional flour if necessary to get right consistency. If using mixer, it should pull away cleanly from mixer bowl. Or if by hand, it should be elastic. Place in greased bowl, cover and let rise until doubled. Punch down and form into rolls. Size and shape is your choice. Place on greased backing sheet and let rise until almost doubled. Remember dough will rise again in oven. bake at 325 until lightly browned.